Software Lead Weekly
Issue #711, 10th July 2026
This Week's Favorite
Should You Still Become a Software Engineer in 2026? (Video)
25 minutes read.
"If I treat the AI as this random anonymous person that's giving me code, well I don't trust the rando on the internet, I'm not going to trust the AI and I barely trust myself." -- Scott Hanselman (GitHub VP) treats AI-generated code exactly like an anonymous open-source PR: same ingress checks, same adversarial review with multiple models, etc.
Read it later via Instapaper.
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25 minutes read.
"If I treat the AI as this random anonymous person that's giving me code, well I don't trust the rando on the internet, I'm not going to trust the AI and I barely trust myself." -- Scott Hanselman (GitHub VP) treats AI-generated code exactly like an anonymous open-source PR: same ingress checks, same adversarial review with multiple models, etc.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
Culture
Vibe Coders’ Daily Struggles, Summed Up in 60 Seconds
1 minutes read.
My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile.
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1 minutes read.
My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
5 Things World-Class Engineers Do That You Don't
5 minutes read.
Steve Huynh's framing of growth cuts against the annual review habit: ask monthly what you can do now that you couldn't do last month, since skills decay faster than we like to admit. We all default to yearly self-assessment because it's easier, but the engineers who are actually compounding are those running this check every few weeks.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
5 minutes read.
Steve Huynh's framing of growth cuts against the annual review habit: ask monthly what you can do now that you couldn't do last month, since skills decay faster than we like to admit. We all default to yearly self-assessment because it's easier, but the engineers who are actually compounding are those running this check every few weeks.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
The Laws of This World (Game Theory)
8 minutes read.
Christian Sieger's core argument is uncomfortable for engineers: effort is linear, but position is exponential. Grinding harder inside the same seat rarely changes your outcomes, no matter how many hours you log. What actually moves the needle is which leverage type you're standing on: people (your network), capital, media (visibility), or code (automation) doing the multiplying while you sleep. Most senior engineers have all four available to them and only ever reach for the first one, working harder instead of repositioning.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
8 minutes read.
Christian Sieger's core argument is uncomfortable for engineers: effort is linear, but position is exponential. Grinding harder inside the same seat rarely changes your outcomes, no matter how many hours you log. What actually moves the needle is which leverage type you're standing on: people (your network), capital, media (visibility), or code (automation) doing the multiplying while you sleep. Most senior engineers have all four available to them and only ever reach for the first one, working harder instead of repositioning.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
The AI Agency - A Novel GTM for Machine Learning SaaS Startups
3 minutes read.
Tomasz Tunguz's read on AI agencies is that the smartest ML startups aren't trying to out-sell agencies, they're becoming them. By taking on agency-style delivery instead of staying a pure software vendor, these startups capture 95 to 100 percent of a client's spend (OPEX of salaries) instead of the 5 to 10 percent a software-only vendor gets, while using automation to keep headcount from scaling linearly with revenue, the way it does for a traditional agency. It's the agency's own economics, minus the agency's own cost structure.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
3 minutes read.
Tomasz Tunguz's read on AI agencies is that the smartest ML startups aren't trying to out-sell agencies, they're becoming them. By taking on agency-style delivery instead of staying a pure software vendor, these startups capture 95 to 100 percent of a client's spend (OPEX of salaries) instead of the 5 to 10 percent a software-only vendor gets, while using automation to keep headcount from scaling linearly with revenue, the way it does for a traditional agency. It's the agency's own economics, minus the agency's own cost structure.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
Peopleware
46 Thoughts on the Near Future
8 minutes read.
Bayes shares 46 predictions on the AI-driven near future, with an interesting insight I took from it: "It does seem hard to imagine how humans will contribute on the margin to the knowledge part of knowledge work for much longer." Just swap "humans" for your team and "knowledge work" for your own role: where's your margin once it goes to zero?
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
8 minutes read.
Bayes shares 46 predictions on the AI-driven near future, with an interesting insight I took from it: "It does seem hard to imagine how humans will contribute on the margin to the knowledge part of knowledge work for much longer." Just swap "humans" for your team and "knowledge work" for your own role: where's your margin once it goes to zero?
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
The Last Technical Interview
13 minutes read.
Steve Yegge shares the exercise that broke his faith in technical interviews: Google ran a calibration test where hiring committees reviewed anonymized packets and unknowingly rejected their own members. If your own bar raisers can't recognize themselves through the process, the process isn't measuring what you think it's measuring. So the real argument isn't that interviews are unfair; it's that they were built for a labor shortage that no longer exists: when candidates were scarce, a flawed dating-round process was tolerable overhead. We all know the market has flipped to surplus, so the cost of a broken signal is no longer hidden by how hard it was to get anyone in the door at all.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
13 minutes read.
Steve Yegge shares the exercise that broke his faith in technical interviews: Google ran a calibration test where hiring committees reviewed anonymized packets and unknowingly rejected their own members. If your own bar raisers can't recognize themselves through the process, the process isn't measuring what you think it's measuring. So the real argument isn't that interviews are unfair; it's that they were built for a labor shortage that no longer exists: when candidates were scarce, a flawed dating-round process was tolerable overhead. We all know the market has flipped to surplus, so the cost of a broken signal is no longer hidden by how hard it was to get anyone in the door at all.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
Daily Writing Is the New Weightlifting.
2 minutes read.
Short, important reminder from Shaan Puri: "Daily writing is the new weightlifting. [...] The brain is a muscle, and it will atrophy if you don’t use it." Writing is thinking. In today's let's-generate-everything-with-AI, your ability to produce insights and guide AI (while setting deterministic guardrails) is your IQ margin.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
2 minutes read.
Short, important reminder from Shaan Puri: "Daily writing is the new weightlifting. [...] The brain is a muscle, and it will atrophy if you don’t use it." Writing is thinking. In today's let's-generate-everything-with-AI, your ability to produce insights and guide AI (while setting deterministic guardrails) is your IQ margin.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
Inspiring Tweets
@SahilBloom: My grandfather told me this: "You’ll achieve much more by being consistently reliable than by being occasionally extraordinary." You can get pretty damn far in life by just being someone that people can count on to show up and do the work. I'll never forget that.
@readswithravi: “No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you.” — Carl Jung
- Oren
P.S. Can you share this email? I'd love for more people to experiment and improve their company's culture.
P.S. Can you share this email? I'd love for more people to experiment and improve their company's culture.